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The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton
Random House
May 2008
On Sale: April 24, 2008
320 pages
ISBN: 1400060699
EAN: 9781400060696
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Denys Finch Hatton was adored by women and idolized by men.
A champion of Africa, legendary for his good looks, his
charm, and his prowess as a soldier, lover, and hunter,
Finch Hatton inspired Karen Blixen to write the
unforgettable stories in Out of Africa. Now esteemed
British biographer Sara Wheeler tells the truth about this
extraordinarily charismatic adventurer. Born to an old aristocratic family that had gambled away
most of its fortune, Finch Hatton grew up in a world of
effortless elegance and boundless power. Tall and graceful,
with the soul of a poet and an athlete’s relaxed
masculinity, he became a hero without trying at Eton and
Oxford. In 1910, searching for novelty and danger, Finch
Hatton arrived in British East Africa and fell in love–with
a continent, with a landscape, with a way of life that was
about to change forever. Wheeler brilliantly conjures the mystical beauty of Kenya
at a time when teeming herds of wild animals roamed
unmolested across pristine savannah. No one was more deeply
attuned to this beauty than Finch Hatton–and no one more
bitterly mourned its passing when the outbreak of World War
I engulfed the region in a protracted, bloody guerrilla
conflict. Finch Hatton was serving as a captain in the
Allied forces when he met Karen Blixen in Nairobi and
embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth
century. With delicacy and grace, Wheeler teases out truth from
fiction in the liaison that Blixen herself immortalized in
Out of Africa. Intellectual equals, bound by their love for
the continent and their inimitable sense of style, Finch
Hatton and Blixen were genuine pioneers in a land that was
quickly being transformed by violence, greed, and bigotry.
Ever restless, Finch Hatton wandered into a career as a big-
game hunter and became an expert bush pilot; his passion
that led to his affair with the notoriously unconventional
aviatrix Beryl Markham. But Markham was no more able to
hold him than Blixen had been. Mesmerized all his life by
the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes
Wheeler, “the open road made flesh.” In painting a portrait of an irresistible man, Sara Wheeler
has beautifully captured the heady glamour of the vanished
paradise of colonial East Africa. In Too Close to the Sun
she has crafted a book that is as ravishing as its subject.
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